Metrics to Maximize Matching Gifts
It’s impossible to gauge your matching gift success if you don’t have a good starting point. It would be like constructing a house and forgetting to pour the foundation. Knowing how many total donations your nonprofit receives on a monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis will help your organization going forward. When you have a comprehensive indication of what your donation flow is, you’ll be better prepared for measuring your matching gift success.
Out of the donations that you’ve already received, you might know who your donors’ employers are based on what type of information you collect during the donation process. You can use this data to determine which of your donors are eligible to have their donations matched. While it is unlikely that all of your matching-gift-eligible donors are doubling their donations, your nonprofit can benefit by knowing what percentage of your total donations have the potential to have their contributions matched by their employers.
While you might want to jump right into measuring how many matching gifts your nonprofit receives, it’s worthwhile to look at how many requests your donors are actually submitting. You might find that you aren’t getting all of the matched donations that your donors are requesting. This gap may boil down to: While your nonprofit can’t do much to shift the matching gift deadlines or rules that companies have set up, knowing how many of your donors are submitting matching gift requests can give you a good idea of how many of them are at least aware that such programs exist.
Before your organization has access to the money from a matching gift donation, you must first verify that you have received it. Once you know how many requests are being made by your donors, you can identify how many of those your nonprofit is actually verifying. If you are only verifying a portion of the matching gift donations that your donors are submitting, then you could be missing out big time. Keeping track of this metric can be useful for filling in those gaps.
This is one of the most important metrics to keep track of. When your organization has verified the submitted matching gifts from your donors’ employers, you can finally count them as “received matching gifts.” Tracking this metric over the months and years will help your nonprofit identify what strategies are working and which ones you should tweak. For instance, if you notice that you receive more matching gifts after your year-end appeals have been made, take a look at the matching gift marketing strategies you used leading up to December 31st. If you aren’t already, implement those tactics for your fundraising all year round for greater matching gift success.
Metrics to Measure Overall Matching Gift Performance
While it’s good to know how many matching gift donations your nonprofit receives, it’s important to put that number into perspective. Calculating the matching gift percentage is easy. You simply divide the number of matching gifts received by the total number of donations. Multiply by 100 and you’ll have your matching gift percentage! Knowing the matching gift percentage is equally if not more important than knowing how many matching gifts you received. Additionally, keeping track of this particular metric over time helps your nonprofit see the growth or decline in your received matching gifts as they relate to your overall fundraising efforts.
While you’ll already know the number of matching gifts that you’ve received, you’ll need to determine the value of those donations as well. If you brought in 50 matching gifts but each one was only for $10, you may need to start targeting your larger givers and encourage them to look into matching gift programs.
Finally, your nonprofit will want to determine the rate of increase of your individual donations that came about because of matching gifts. Calculating this particular matching gift metric is helpful in finding out the value of your matching gift donations as they compare to the overall value of all of your contributions. You simply have to divide the total value of your donations by the value of your received matching gifts to find out the percentage of increase due to matching gifts!
Additional Matching Gift Resources
Guide to Matching Gifts
Want to learn more about the basics of matching gifts? Read Double the Donation’s ultimate guide to matching gifts and get the full scoop!
Matching Gift Companies
Wondering who the leaders in corporate philanthropy are? Check out our list of the top matching gift companies that go the extra mile!
Promoting Matching Gifts
Your donors won’t submit matching gift requests unless you ask them to! Read more about how you can market matching gifts to donors.
